Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (40 page)

Read Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century Online

Authors: Laurence Lerner

Tags: #History, #Modern, #19th Century, #Social Science, #Death & Dying, #test

 
Page 101
My girls had for some time been hearing from the peasant children about angels, about the knight Rupert and about the holy Christ, who appeared in person at certain times, and were supposed to give presents to good children and punish the naughty. They had an idea that they were people in disguise, an idea which I encouraged, and without going too much into explanations I decided to lay on such a performance for them at the first opportunity. I had selected Mignon for this role (that of an angel), and when the day came she was suitably dressed in a long light white robe. I wanted at first to leave out the wings, but the women who were getting her ready insisted on a pair of large golden pinions in order to show off their skill.
Though written in the eighteenth century, this sounds like religion after Feuerbach. Christian myths are valued as a set of images to represent human feelings and relationships; they should not be believed in, but put to good use. Supernatural trappings, like wings, should preferably be omitted, but can be retained if they mean a lot to those taking part. Natalie's agnostic respect for religion would have appealed to George Eliot.
The angel, when it appears, interprets itself to the children in agnostic terms:
Bist du ein Engel, fragte das eine Kind.
Ich wollte, ich wär' es, versetzte Mignon.
Warum trägst Du eine Lilie?
So rein und offen sollte mein Herz sein, dann wär' ich glücklich.
"Are you an angel?" asked one of the children.
"I"d like to be," declared Mignon.
"Why are you carrying a lily?''
"My heart should be as pure and open as it is; then I"d be happy."
The angels of
The Old Curiosity, Shop,
too, are not always inhabitants of heaven. The schoolmaster explains to Nell that "there is not an angel added to the Host of Heaven but does its blessed work on earth in those that loved it here" (chapter 52): here "angel" is little more than a term to suggest, without obvious unorthodoxy, that immortality consists in becoming your admirers, in a continued life in the memory of the living. And when we are told that it is by means of the "mild lovely look" of the dead
 
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Nell that we shall know the angels in their majesty, after death, we can reverse the sequence and read it as telling us that "angel" is a figure for bestowing status on the loveliness of the dead child.
Does this mean that the Dickensian angel has broken free of the Christian belief from which it originated? This is the view of Nina Auerbach, who, aware that we have lost sympathy with the "numinous element" of Victorian novels, attempts to recuperate some of the force of these angels for the modern reader by seeing them as "emanations of an intensely felt and thoroughly non-Christian religion that Dickens shared with many of his most brilliant contemporaries".
15
Whether this replacement of direct value judgment by cultural history can be used to change the value judgment is a question I shall address in the last chapter; here I pause for a moment on the assertion that these angels belong to a thoroughly non-Christian religion. That angels are a traditional part of Christian belief is not, of course, in doubt. Medieval theology elaborated a series of propositions about the angelic orders which had the appearance of rigorous system; it left its traces in
Paradise Lost
, where the angels are ranked as "Thrones, dominations, virtues, princes, powers," but this is probably one of the details that made
Paradise Lost
old-fashioned; it faded from Protestantism, and the angels who are so prominent in nineteenth century imagery are no longer ranked in ternions and classes: such a system is by then seen as "a fruitful theme for those who have exhibited perhaps more ingenuity and subtlety than humility and reverence." For Mrs. Stone, author of this remark, graves are the footprints of angels. Angels have now become symbols of the emotional life, above all of grief and hope; and belief (perhaps we should say ''belief") in angels has taken a new lease of life.
16
The almost imperceptible detachment of angels from other-worldliness permeates
The Old Curiosity Shop
and is found elsewhere in Dickensin
A Child's Dream of a Star
, for instance, another tale of child death, which ends with a vignette of heaven seen as a kind of family reunion:
My daughter's head is on my sister's bosom, and her arm is around my mother's neck, and at her feet there is the baby of old time, and I can bear the parting from her, GOD be praised.
This does not look like the heaven where there is no marrying or giving in marriage, but it is very like the heaven whose gates are ajar and in which we shall recognize our friends.
17
It illustrates perfectly Ariès' claim that the
 
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heavenly home, in the nineteenth century, becomes "the earthly home saved from the menace of time" (though not, surely, his further claim that "when God is dead, the cult of the dead becomes the only authentic religion," because this family seems so very much alive.)
18
In the mid-nineteenth century, before the death of God has been announced, Christianity has already begun to turn into religiosity.
Aries' point is very like Auerbach's, though whether we call it "thoroughly non-Christian" will depend on whether we equate Christianity with Christian theology. And in a curious way the point is also made by Dickens himself. At the moment of Paul Dombey's death, the term "old-fashioned," with which the novel has made such play, is reintroduced, in order to speak of "the old, old fashionDeath!." Immediately after that comes the final paragraph:
Oh thank God, all who see it, for that older fashion yet, of Immortality! And look upon us, angels of young children, with regards not quite estranged, when the swift river bears us to the ocean! (Chapter 16)
One reason for the enormous emotional impact this had on contemporaries may be its ambivalence about Christianity. It does not actually profess belief in immortality: by calling it, so lovingly, a "fashion," the writing offers it as a beneficent invention, a doctrine devised to help us bear the pain of death. Yet this Feuerbachian claim is uttered not critically, not even sceptically, but with gratitude. And so the angels of young children could be seen as a human invention, a way we have taught ourselves to speak of dead children, and all the finer for that. What weakens the theology strengthens the consolation.
Christianity, with the prominence given to sin, is not a sentimental religion, but it can be sentimentalized. When Paul is ill, and still at Dr. Blimber's, he thinks frequently of an uplifting religious picture:
He had much to think of in association with a print that hung up in another place, where, in the centre of a wondering group, one figure that he knew, a figure with a light about its headbenignant, mild, and mercifulstood pointing upward. (
Dombey and Son
, chapter 14)
Here is Jesus Christ without any theological content: not the son of God, not divine, certainly not crucified, not even supernatural: simply an

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